a convenient truth

The Government wants ISPs to stop illegal downloads.

This is so wrong headed it’s hard to see what on earth they’re thinking of. Presumably they envisage a technology solution, which is pretty typical amongst people like government ministers - hey well my computer can tell when I’m writing a letter and show me a paperclip, so surely it must be able to stop copyright infringement!

Here’s a few issues that I think are pretty much insoluble:

How can you tell what content infringes copyright?

There’s a couple of options here. Blacklisting known infringers sounds like a good idea, but it’s got problems.

Sites such as The PirateBay don’t themselves distribute copyright material. They host only the (non-copyright) torrent tracker, and the downloaders all share the content amongst themselves.  These downloaders are on moving IP addresses and come and go pretty randomly, and are all over the world and the UK.

So who do you blacklist?

A team of people inspecting torrent sites for suspicious material, and then tracking the torrents, finding the IP addresses of all peers and then adding them to a rolling blacklist that’s used by all IPs might work.  Well work as in generate an actual list of blacklistable IP addresses.  This is the sort of technique the Chinese use, with quite a lot of success.  There will be a lot of collatoral damage though, and in a free society that’s very difficult to justify.  And justify it, in court, they are going to have to do.

Blacklisting The PirateBay sounds good, and is much easier, but new torrent sites will pop up all the time. Again the judiciary will have a very dim view of arbitrary censorship of people who have been convicted of no crime.  I don’t see this method working beyond the first few lawsuits.

Alternatively they might imagine some sort of fingerprinting. Every stream will be examined on the fly, perhaps for the evil bit. With a bit of work it’s possible to probably identify some copyright work using fingerprinting, with quite a few mistakes. Of course, this is defeated utterly by encryption. Right now torrents aren’t encrypted, but I think it will take approximately 1.2 nanoseconds for everyone to move to encrypted torrents if something like this comes in.

Some ISPs might go as far as blocking bittorrent. This is relatively easy to do, and much harder to avoid, however loads of services use bittorrent now that are perfectly legal. Even the BBC’s own iPlayer uses the same sort of technology, and I can see how popular banning that would be.

How do you know it’s working?

They are threatening to punish ISPs unless they “do something”. Precisely how are they going to decide who to punish? Is there going to be some sort of quota - “you have banned 50 users this week, you have unlocked an achievement!”. Sorry, that should be “50 customers”.

There just isn’t a reasonable success metric, and ISPs are not going to voluntarily ban their own customers.  They’ll kick and scream and resist wherever they can, so whatever .gov.uk comes up with is going to have to be enforceable in court.  That means metrics that are clear, fair and measurable.  I just don’t believe such a thing exists.

Ultimately this is just the content exploitation industries failing to address the fact that their business model was temporary. It relied on a particular coincidence of technological limitations and market opportunities. This has changed and now they are about as useful as a bicycle to the proverbial fish.

I just can’t see this happening without a huge amount of damage to the government, and the whole idea being binned in the end.  I just hope they aren’t dumb enough to do it.

Last.FM have announced that they will be providing a huge amount of their catalogue available for free, streamed from their site, with artists paid from advertising and possibly some sort of subscription model.

This is part of a worldwide trend anticipated by many of us for a very long time. Several mobile phone networks are in the process of releasing “music plus” packages, where you get pretty much any music you like, for free, at any time. Again, artists are paid from the phone subscription package.

Obviously streamed music can be copied. Over at Rogue Amoeba, who produce Audio Hijack Pro, they’re an interesting post on this, wondering if this is going to be a problem for the free-streamed model Last.FM have developed.

I don’t think it matters. You won’t bother keeping a copy for yourself for much longer in any case. Why have copies of all those CDs, or MP3s, when it’s all available from the Internet, all the time, at zero cost and effort? The only reason to keep a copy yourself was an artifact of the primitive method of packaging and distribution - not because there being millions of individual copies of a piece of music is inherently useful.

So, in ten year’s time, I reckon the kids won’t have a single copy of mainstream music themselves. Their record collection will consist of a set of bookmarks only - and the whole “music business” as it currently stands will just be a brief “blip” in the history of music, from it’s origins in live-only performance to it’s future as a ubiquitous cultural service in the cloud.

Encouraging people to contribute knowledge, a post on the official google blog seems to be trumpeting the arrival of a Google competitor to Wikipaedia.   It works in a rather different way though - instead of a single authoritative article on a subject, each article will have a single author and there can be multiple articles on the same subject.

This means there is no need for direct editorial control - Google’s contribution extends only to which articles are offered in response to which searches.  On this subject Udi Manber has no fear that this presents too much of a challenge:

Once testing is completed, participation in knols will be completely open, and we cannot expect that all of them will be of high quality. Our job in Search Quality will be to rank the knols appropriately when they appear in Google search results. We are quite experienced with ranking web pages, and we feel confident that we will be up to the challenge. We are very excited by the potential to substantially increase the dissemination of knowledge.

Of course Google’s commercial motivation is never far away:

At the discretion of the author, a knol may include ads. If an author chooses to include ads, Google will provide the author with substantial revenue share from the proceeds of those ads.

It remains to be seen how well this works of course.  Wikipedia’s famed Neutral Point of View is an unattainable goal in reality, however the attempt to achieve it has a lot of value and the compromises some otherwise irreconcilable communities have achieved on Wikipedia is impressive.

I look forward to seeing how Google deal with the inevitable edit and comment war that will accompany contentious subjects, particularly the rather random set of subjects that comprise the US Culture Wars: Abortion, the Iraq War, the United Nations, Gun Control and the rest.

If they can deal with these without human intervention then maybe Google really can bring world peace

I saw this on MeFi, and some of the links are fascinating. Ross Perot is selling a 1297 copy of the Magna Carta. It is one of 17 copies, and the only one not in institutional ownership in the Commonwealth.

The Magna Carta certainly has some great words in it (this is taken from the article referred to later):

The provisions of the Magna Carta reveal among other things the famous chapter 39 from which habeas corpus, prohibition of torture, trial by jury, and the rule of law are derived:

Chapter 39: No free man shall be arrested or imprisoned or disseised or outlawed or exiled or any way victimized, neither will we attack him or send anyone to attack him, except by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land. Chapter 40: To no one will we sell, to no one will we refuse or delay right or justice.

We also see that “one of the first great stages in the emancipation of women is to be traced” to the Magna Carta.⁵ The most valuable individual provisions in the eyes of the only contemporary chronicler (a minstrel attached to Robert of Béthune) are those treating the disparagement of women:

Chapter 7: A widow shall have her marriage portion and inheritance forthwith and without difficulty after the death of her husband . . . Chapter 8: No widow shall be forced to marry so long as she wishes to live without a husband . . .

It put a stop to the robberies of petty tyrants: Chapter 28: No constable or other bailiff of ours shall take anyone’s corn or other chattels unless he pays on the spot in cash for them . . .

I had previously thought that, for all it’s emotive language, the Magna Carta was basically PR. There’s a fantastic article in the Boston Review of all places that covers the history of the Magna Carta in more detail, and there is a whole lot more to it than a tiff between a skint King and some irritating Barons.

He means free as in hairy naked hippies frolicking across the meadow, not free as in stealing a Faberge egg from a museum by executing an implausibly complex plan involving a variety of non-existent high-tech gadgets.

– Anonymous Coward, Slashdot

We have a massive problem with the Internet.  The massive penetration of malware has reached epidemic proportions, and it’s hard to see how to fix it.  This PDF has some great slides that show how the malware industry works.
Everyone you ask will have a different target to blame: Microsoft, application vendors, insecure protocols and standards, the police, clueless users .  The real problem is a network effect - it really takes a combination of failures to make this problem as gigantic as it now is.  There is a real risk of the end of the Internet as we know it.

A good example of this is the Storm Worm.  When this hits, we could see the largest piece of military or economic infowar ever undertaken, presumably depending on who they auction their network to.  Seriously, this is going to be huge.

Unless the security community take their responsibilities seriously and combat this directly, it’s hard to know how the Internet can cope with such widespread infection.  However the state-sponsored police organisations are woefully clueless, and the guys who know what to do are paralysed by fear of prosecution, fear of making a mistake, and fear of execution by Russian hit-men.  Seriously.  If this was a movie, you wouldn’t believe it.

There is something horrific about this. The Israeli Defence Force, which is probably the most competent army in the world (recent cock ups notwithstanding) have philosophers in their ranks.  And the stuff they are reading and applying is weird.  You would not like to be anywhere near these guys when they execute their theories in hardware:

We read Christopher Alexander, can you imagine?; we read John Forester, and other architects. We are reading Gregory Bateson; we are reading Clifford Geertz. Not myself, but our soldiers, our generals are reflecting on these kinds of materials. We have established a school and developed a curriculum that trains “operational architects”.’4 In a lecture Naveh showed a diagram resembling a ‘square of opposition’ that plots a set of logical relationships between certain propositions referring to military and guerrilla operations. Labelled with phrases such as ‘Difference and Repetition – The Dialectics of Structuring and Structure’, ‘Formless Rival Entities’, ‘Fractal Manoeuvre’, ‘Velocity vs. Rhythms’, ‘The Wahabi War Machine’, ‘Postmodern Anarchists’ and ‘Nomadic Terrorists’, they often reference the work of Deleuze and Guattari. War machines, according to the philosophers, are polymorphous; diffuse organizations characterized by their capacity for metamorphosis, made up of small groups that split up or merge with one another, depending on contingency and circumstances. (Deleuze and Guattari were aware that the state can willingly transform itself into a war machine. Similarly, in their discussion of ‘smooth space’ it is implied that this conception may lead to domination.)

I’m not sure I’ve ever heard such bizarre theoretical justification for murder.

Another great article from MindHacks: Terrorism fails because we don’t see its purpose. This seems particularly plausible, and reminds of the way Hitler is generally described, as an example.  It seems impossible to believe he was rational, since his actions were so horrendous and extreme.  That of course, doesn’t make him irrational - it just makes him morally questionable.

The BBC have, for reasons that seem rather opaque, decided to use a particularly grim form of technology for their iPlayer.  It uses DRM to stop the content viewed from being shared, which also stops it working on most platforms - it will only be available for Windows.  This all seems pretty retrograde, especially when pretty much all BBC output is available for free download from UKNova.  What precisely are they trying to protect?

Anyway, now the BBC Trust is going to meet the OSC to discuss it.  I hope the Trust shows some teeth here, and tells the BBC where to get off.  We’ve already paid for all this programming, so why on earth can’t we just watch it when we want?

Seeing yellow: When you print on a color laser printer, it’s likely that you are also printing a pattern of invisible yellow dots. These marks exist to allow the printer companies and governments to track and identify you — presumably as a way to combat money counterfeiting. When one person asked his printer manufacturer about turning off the tracking dots, Secret Service agents showed up at his door several days later.